“Bunny, you talk like your grandmother!”
“But what about the servants, dear?”
“Servants, hell!” said Eunice. “You can run your home to please the servants, but that’s not our way—at least, not tonight!” And to save Bunny any embarrassment, she kept him in her room in the morning while she broke the news to her mother; and if there were any mental agonies Bunny never knew it, because the patroness of the Serbian orphans breakfasted in bed, reading in the morning paper the account of her fashionable philanthropies.
After that, the ice was broken—as the French have observed, it is the first step that counts, thought it is doubtful if any parent in old-fashioned France has been compelled to take quite so long a step. The rainy season continued, making outdoor petting parties uncomfortable, so whenever he was commanded, Bunny would stay in Eunice’s home, and it was all quite domestic and regular according to advanced modern standards. In fact, there was only one small detail left, and Bunny suggested that: “Eunice, why shouldn’t we go and get married, and have it over with?”
He was surprised by the vehemence of the girl’s reaction. “Oh, Bunny, we’re having such a happy time, and why do you want to ruin it?”
“But why would that ruin it?”
“All married people are miserable. I know, because I’ve watched them. Mamma and Papa would give a million dollars—well, maybe not that much but certainly a couple of hundred thousand, if they could get loose without having to go through all the fuss in the courts, and the horrid things the newspapers would publish, and their pictures and all.”
“But we won’t have to do that, dear.”
“How do you know we mightn’t? If we got married, you’d think you had a right to me, and then you wouldn’t do what I say any more, and I wouldn’t be happy. Oh, let’s do our own way, and not what other people try to make us. All my life other people have been making me do things, and I’ve been fighting them—even you, Bunny-bear.” She had a score of such appellatives for him, because, as you can understand, his name was adapted to petting-party uses; they were dancing a contrivance known as the Bunny-hug, and he heard a lot about that.
You went about in this prosperous and fashionable society, and on the surface everything was decorous and proper, fitting the marital formulas laid down in the laws and preached in the churches. But when you got under the surface—anywhere, high or low—what you found was that human beings, finding themselves unhappy, had come to private understandings. Husbands and wives set one another free, they made exchanges of partners, they brought friends into their homes, who were in reality substitute husbands or wives; there were companions and secretaries and governesses and cousins who played such roles—and when the children found it out, they were in position to put pressure on their parents, a kind of informal family blackmail, good for motor-cars and fur-coats and strings of pearls, and most precious of all, the right to have your own way.